A 450-mile stretch of highway in British Columbia, Canada, has been dubbed the “Highway of Tears” for the number of unsolved murders of women that have taken place on it. Police officially list nineteen victims, of whom thirteen were teenagers and ten were Indigenous women, although activists list as many as forty murders.13 So far, only one murder has been solved, attributed to serial killer Cody Legebokoff.
The ditches and roadsides of the American interstate freeway system alone have been the scene of almost five hundred unsolved homicides over the last thirty years, and at least twenty-five truckers have been convicted in serial-homicide cases. In 2009 the FBI launched a special Highway Serial Killings Initiative (HSKI) targeting serial killers suspected to be working as truckers.14 While the majority of truckers are hardworking, decent people, the lonely anonymity of a trucker’s life and constant mobility are conducive to the personality of serial killers.
EXPLAINING THE APPARENT DECLINE IN THE NUMBER OF SERIAL KILLERS
In his blog, serial-homicide researcher Enzo Yaksic, recently nicknamed “Profiler 2.0” by Boston magazine, offers a persuasive menu of reasons why serial killing might be in decline for good, rather than just following the decline of overall murder rates. The reasons run the gamut from social, technological and forensic to psychological, cultural and historical.15
Technological-Social
Since the 1990s, the ubiquitous use of cell phones has not only added some margin of safety for potential victims but has also made the tracking of suspected serial killers’ movements substantially easier for police. Today police routinely track cell-tower pings on a suspect’s cell phone account, easily disassembling any false alibi. Obviously an intelligent, highly organized serial killer will adopt countermeasures or use an anonymous “burner” cell phone, but not all serial killers are organized or even know that they are going to kill again, until they kill again. Some kill targets of opportunity spontaneously, without planning.
The ubiquitous presence of surveillance cameras can capture the movements of a suspect. Surveillance cameras can even routinely record a suspect’s movements before the suspect has decided to perpetrate a murder. There are no countermeasures for something you do not know you are going to do.
While social media can expose users to targeting by strangers, it mostly focuses users into personal networks in which interaction with strangers is restricted and where strangers can be screened before any interaction is initiated. Furthermore, cell phones, the Internet and video games have reduced the number of vulnerable children and adolescents playing outdoors unsupervised. Potential offenders are also exposed through their own posts on social media, and there have been cases of terrorism and mass murder being prevented when the would-be perpetrators were apprehended before they committed their acts because they posted their intentions on social media.
Cell phone, text and social media transactions assist police in identifying and understanding relationships and contacts between suspects and victims, so essential to any homicide investigation. Erasing these records locally on a cell phone or computer changes nothing, as service providers store this data on their remote servers. An attorney defending a client accused of serial murder complained to me that it has become impossible for him to match the resources available to police to “vacuum up” enormous volumes of cell phone, text and Internet data. To analyze the massive amounts of highly technical data and develop a defense to police interpretations of what it means is impossible for the average defendant.
Beyond the resources of law enforcement, true-crime “as it happens” reality TV and social media “cloud sourcing” allow for the dissemination of information about serial-murder cases and invite the public to contribute to the investigation of a case. While much of the information and speculation is useless or amateurish, police can sometimes cherry-pick valuable leads from the mass of “noise.” For example, recently in the case of the LISK murders, the true-crime online forum Websleuths and the A&E series The Killing Season led to a significant identification of a LISK victim’s remains that police had overlooked in their own investigation16 (or at least did not disclose to the public). In the same way that amateur astronomical observers contribute to the detection of stellar phenomena in “cloud-sourced astronomy,” police can tap into similar “cloud investigative analysis” contributed by amateurs and filter the signal from the noise. As one police officer said to me recently, “In a homicide investigation, there is no such thing as ‘too much information.’”
Forensic Advances
Law enforcement is more experienced and better equipped now to deal with pathological serial murder than it was thirty-five years ago when the term “serial killer” did not even exist in the popular vocabulary or imagination. When the FBI first devised their profiling system in the 1980s, they based it on data gathered from only twenty-nine convicted serial killers and seven solo sexual murderers. It was criticized for not having a large enough data sample to make conclusions. The FBI’s most recent study, from 2014, is based on 480 cases of sexual serial murder involving 92 male offenders.17 (Unfortunately, the FBI has kept the raw data and the identities of the serial killers inaccessible to serial-homicide researchers outside the agency.)
The pathology of serial killers has become so familiar to investigators that often “serial killers” can be apprehended after one or two murders, cutting short their future “careers” and notoriety. As researchers Enzo Yaksic, Lindsey DeSpirito and Sasha Reid observe,
Terms such as “budding,” “potential,” “becoming,” “obsessed,” “in-training” and “possible” are often used in conjunction with the phrase “serial murderer” to describe offenders that either admit to maintaining serial “tendencies” or outwardly display a desire to murder additional people upon capture for their first attempted or completed offense.18
The introduction of forensic DNA technology, unavailable for much of the “golden age” epidemic period, was a huge game changer and continues to be so. Currently the controversial technique of gathering familial DNA from a suspect’s relatives to link that suspect to a crime has been on the leading edge of a new investigative strategy. It’s especially useful in closing cold cases where the suspect might be long dead. Opponents argue that it subjects innocent family members to an unconstitutional search if done without their permission.
Geoforensic profiling, as described in chapter ten, is continually becoming more accurate, able to pinpoint a suspect to a 150-square-yard “anchor” with increasing efficiency. Brain-scanning technology is promising a new generation of lie-detecting polygraphs that can detect which part of the brain a suspect is using during an investigative interview, the “memory” part or the “storytelling imaginative” part.
Databases like ViCAP and communication nets, although still not perfect, have reduced some of the linkage blindness that in the past prevented serial murders from being recognized as such. Linkage blindness has been reduced even among murders committed in different parts of the country.
Police investigators are today better versed and better educated in interview techniques with suspects in pathological crimes and are better trained in how to manage interviews with a deceptively unfeeling psychopath. And of course, police in general have become more open at the initial stages of an investigation to considering the possibility of a serial killer than they had been in the 1980s when such offenders were perceived to be extremely rare and exotic. That too can contribute to an early arrest in a serial-homicide case. Furthermore, some police departments, especially at the state level, have employed criminal analysts to crunch data essential in identifying serial crimes, and have selected officers for supplementary training or graduate degrees in psychopathology or psychological and geographic profiling.
Cultural-Psychological
While light-years from a mission completed, American males since the 1960s have been continually socialized, cultured and sensitized to women’s rights and issue
s. The sadistic rape magazine covers I described, still viable and mainstream as late as the 1970s, would be unthinkable from the 1990s onward anywhere other than on the Internet.
Misogyny still lives on in the more reptilian recesses of college-aged male brains, which still apparently fantasize about rape if “they can get away with it.”19 Misogynist commentary has spewed forth from a presidential candidate on an Access Hollywood “hot mic,” but it has become significantly less excused or dismissed or joked off than it was, say, twenty or thirty years ago. (But not enough to change the electoral result in this case.)
Psychologically too, people are less repressed regarding unconventional sexual impulses that were once considered evil or sick or shameful. There is less impetus to act out these impulses secretly with the use of force and killing. Jerry Brudos’s fetish for women’s shoes would be less likely today to shame him sufficiently to kill women for it. The trauma and angst resulting from a single act of college-student oral sex that Philip Roth describes in his book Indignation, set in 1951, would have been inconceivable twenty years later, in 1971.
As I described in chapter three, psychiatry has destigmatized and delisted “happy paraphilics” whose compulsions do not lead them to hurt themselves or others. Culture today is pervasively more tolerant, more live-and-let-live and inclusive and less repressive and judgmental, allowing people to be more accepting not only of others but, more importantly, of themselves. This permissiveness increases the chance for sexual paraphilics to find willing partners with a compatibility of paraphilias, and the Internet further enhances their ability to find one another (although the Internet, of course, also enhances the ability of a deceptive serial killer to troll, stalk and trap victims).20
Yes, I know I am writing in a new political age, which is testing the limits of progressive and inclusive thought in America, and there are vast holdouts of bigotry, racism and sexism, but since the 1960s, despite the clamor of the “Moral Majority,” they have been steadily losing ground. There is less trauma, shame and loneliness today in being different from one’s peers, and therefore less need for fantasies of vengeance and control that sometimes are expressed in serial killing.
Nor is a serial killer today the rebel “antihero” he once was at the height of the “golden age,” and serial killing is no longer an easy ticket to celebrity in the way it had been up until the 1990s. Transgressive, rebellious, pathological antiheroics today are more likely to be expressed as suicidal episodes of mass murder and, more recently, as acts of self-radicalized terrorism, the new career path for the lonely, isolated and once-bullied misfit.
Moreover, mental health institutions, no matter how underfunded and despite horror stories of having overlooked potentially dangerous subjects, are generally better equipped and better educated to recognize symptoms of budding violent serial offenders.
Availability of Pornographic Media
There is still no agreement as to whether pornography stimulates, shapes and facilitates transgressive behavior or acts as a “safety valve” alternative to acting out a fantasy. Since the 1990s pornography has become more easily available on the Internet and often for free. Its range of paraphilic specificity is also significantly expanded on the Internet. Online porn can economically sustain a broader selection of specific and narrow paraphilic genres than brick-and-mortar retail-store porn. Moreover, those compelled to consume pornography, often a compulsion bred in shame, no longer need to risk going out in public to storefronts to acquire it. It is discreetly and conveniently available via the Internet.
A study of the sex crime statistics in four countries—the United States, Denmark, Sweden and West Germany—during the twenty-year period from 1964 to 1984, when there was a significant growth in the availability of pornography “from extreme scarcity to relative abundance,” including violent pornography, found that there was no increase in sexual offenses at any rates higher than increases in nonsexual violent crimes, and in some cases, there were actual declines in sexual offenses.21 A more recent study, from 2009, concludes, “Evidence for a causal relationship between exposure to pornography and sexual aggression is slim and may, at certain times, have been exaggerated by politicians, pressure groups and some social scientists. Some of the debate has focused on violent pornography, but evidence of any negative effects is inconsistent . . . Victimization rates for rape in the United States demonstrate an inverse relationship between pornography consumption and rape rates. Data from other nations have suggested similar relationships . . . it is time to discard the hypothesis that pornography contributes to increased sexual assault behavior.”22
Typically, there are recent studies which argue the opposite: “Exposure to pornography helps to sustain young people’s adherence to sexist and unhealthy notions of sex and relationships. And, especially among boys and young men who are frequent consumers of pornography, including of more violent materials, consumption intensifies attitudes supportive of sexual coercion and increases their likelihood of perpetrating assault.”23
It should be pointed out that the mainstream rape imagery in American men’s adventure and true-detective magazines described in the previous chapter was not pornographic.
It was something much worse.
The rape was implicit in the imagery, not explicit. It called upon the observer to complete the fantasy in his imagination, in the advanced cerebral cortex sitting atop his reptilian male brain. It worked on a different part of the brain than explicit imagery does. Moreover, in the 1950s to the 1980s, it was endorsed by mainstream consumer culture because it was sold everywhere from grocery stores to newsstands.
Today there is a copious amount of explicit rape pornography and even a small number of available videos made by serial killers and wannabe serial killers recording their murders. It does not titillate the viewer or beckon him to contemplate the fantasy in his head in the way the adventure magazine covers did. Instead it hammers one in the face with its ugliness and brutality. While implicit rape imagery stimulates the unfulfilled fantasy part of the male brain, the explicit imagery fulfills the perceptual part and might work in a different way.
One might argue that explicit fantasy rape and bondage porn or reality snuff porn preempt the fantasy in the same way serial killers often report being disappointed or depressed by the actualization of a fantasy they long held. The reality is never as appealing or as controllable as the fantasy, serial killers often complain, and their addiction to killing, until some burn out, is rooted in their repeatedly attempting to shorten the time between their fantasy and its attempted realization. Others will argue, however, that viewing ultraviolent porn desensitizes perpetrators and stimulates them to escalate in their compulsive fantasies from porn to reality.
The consumer grocery-store bondage magazines vanished in the 1980s and 1990s, destroyed not so much by changing values and social consciousness as by the economic challenges of publishing a monthly hard-copy magazine in the face of the Internet. Twenty years later, some statistics suggest that the number of cases of serial homicides has declined. The chicken or the egg?
Yes, sadistic content has been moved from the grocery store to the Internet, where it is much more readily available in much more horrifically explicit genres. What changed perhaps is that unlike when the sadistic grocery-store-and-barbershop torture-rape “sweats” were distributed and consumed on par with Time magazine and Sports Illustrated, today that material is “penned in” on the Internet unambiguously as a vice. Moreover, it needs to be proactively sought out, in an adult sector of the Internet, a place understood as what it is, rather than stumbled across in a barbershop among the fish-and-game magazines.
Despite numerous anecdotal instances of violent or pornographic material inspiring viewers to act out, unfortunately to this day we have still not determined the exact relationship between such viewing and acting out, and whether it defuses and preempts sexual aggression or facilitates and inspires it. We just don’t k
now.
Serial Killers Are Better at Getting Away with It
There might be one fly in the ointment: maybe there are fewer cases of serial murder on the record simply because serial killers are better at concealing their crimes now. Many serial killers, especially organized ones, have always been aware of investigative techniques and what police look for. As advances in investigative forensics begin to plateau, serial killers adopt countermeasures that have a longer effective life span. Serial killers who read up on geoforensic profiling, for example, might adopt counterintuitive patterns of movement and selection of crime sites and body dumps to counteract detectable predatory behavioral links.
Serial killers with highlighter pens in hand carefully read and study FBI manuals, academic articles and highly specialized forensic literature on the psychology, pathology and investigation of serial homicide. For pleasure, they read popular true-crime accounts of serial murder. Serial killing is both a compulsion and a learning process.
Dennis Rader, the “BTK Killer,” ran out and bought my first book on the history of serial killers almost as soon as it came out in October 2004. When Rader was arrested five months later in February 2005, he already had the book covered in a rainbow of sticky-notes.24 As homicide specialist Vernon J. Geberth points out, “We are not the only people watching Forensic Files, CSI, The New Detectives, the Discovery Channel, and all of the other programs devoted to criminal investigation.”25
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